Jake Wallis Simons (@JakeWSimons) is a Telegraph features writer, novelist and broadcaster. His website is jakewallissimons.com. Follow him on Facebook here and on Twitter here. His fourth novel, Jam, which is set in a traffic jam on the M25, is out now.

The lesson of the Paris Brown debacle is that teenagers should not be advising the police. Ann Barnes's ridiculous stunt has backfired

It has all been going wrong for Paris Brown, the 17-year-old "Youth Police and Crime Commissioner". A few days ago, the youngster became the first person to hold this bizarre new role, which was created so that the good constables of the Kent Police Force can better "understand the needs of young people". It didn't take long, of course, for her tweets to let her down.

It emerged that earlier in the year, she had tweeted “Why are people from Direct Pizza so difficult to talk to!! IT IS CALLED ENGLISH. LEARN IT”. Fair enough, you might say. However, an investigation revealed that over the last few years she has used Twitter to refer to drug-taking and violence, and used homophobic and prejudiced language in tweets which are too colourful to reproduce in the pages of a family newspaper.

But of course she did. Like, hello? The girl is, like, 17? Ann Barnes, the Police and Crime Commissioner for Kent – who earns £85,000 per year in the role, after spending £68,000 to fund her election campaign – leapt to Brown's defence in an interview with BBC television, railing against the "vitrionic (sic) reports" which have so damaged the image of Ms Brown and Kent Police. When asked if Brown was simply too immature for the role, Mrs Barnes carefully replied that the girl was "maturing very quickly". Her delicate phrasing exposed a self-evident fact: the idea of appointing a 17-year-old to advise adults on young people was a profoundly absurd idea in the first place.

As Miss Brown's tearful BBC appearance demonstrates, this is simply a normal, gauche teenager with ridiculously strident opinions and a naïveté that hits you in the face like a cloud of CK Be. The real travesty here is not the fact that she sent stupid tweets or blubbed on national telly. Is is that our society has become so dismissive of the wisdom of age, and so enamoured of youth, that when a Police and Crime Commissioner suggested it was a good idea to wheel in a teenager to show the adults where they've been going wrong, nobody batted an eyelid. It is SO unFAIR.

Still. Somewhere in a sweaty staff room at Kent Police HQ, a group of grizzled constables will be huddled round a television, sipping tea from stained mugs and nibbling chocolate digestives, chuckling as their Youth Police and Crime Commissioner goes knickers-up in public. They are, perhaps, gaining a valuable insight into just how stupid it is to let teenagers anywhere near heavy machinery, the wine cellar, or a county police force.